Food is medicine: Actions to integrate food and nutrition into healthcare

Key messages

• In the face of the global epidemic of diet related chronic disease, there is increased experimentation with the use of “food is medicine” interventions to prevent, manage, and treat illness

• Interventions used with increasing frequency in the US and piloted to some extent in other countries include medically tailored meals, medically tailored groceries, and produce prescription programmes

• Scaled integration of these and other emerging nutrition interventions into healthcare would require significant investment in rigorous research to test different approaches and address knowledge gaps

• Clinicians need more and better education and training on the appropriateness and use of these interventions

• We also need to identify sustained funding streams to ensure equitable access and availability for patients